Thursday, June 29, 2017

I wrote for the AWP Writer’s Notebook about my experience
doing historical research for REVERSING THE RIVER, my novel set in 1899
Chicago, about to be released on the Great Jones Street literary app (free to download for Apple & Android!).

The piece is called “Eight Things This Fiction Writer
Learned about Historical Research,” and here’s an excerpt:

Number 1: The concept of “enough.” Perhaps the most
important thing that the writer should remember is that one single word:
“enough.” There is “enough” research when you’re writing fiction. You’re not
going to learn everything about your time period, and, frankly, you don’t need
to know everything: you only need to know “enough”—enough to tell your story in
a believable way. You’re not writing an authoritative history; you’re writing a
STORY. People are reading your book to see what happens next to your
characters, not so they can understand trends in Elizabethan England.

So, beware of historians. Historians think you should know
everything. You really only need to know “enough.” I know what kind of carriage
my character Lucy rides in and what the road is like, but I don’t know if there
are still posts to hitch up horses in the street. I don’t know if rich people
in Chicago preferred black horses or brown horses. Sure, it would be nice to
know those things, and if I did, I might throw the information into the story,
but it’s not relevant and it’s not necessary....

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

My writing life changed when THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST won this
contest—and no matter how many times I express how grateful I am to University
of Pittsburgh Press and Mrs. Drue Heinz (benefactor), it will not be enough!
The deadline for entries is June 30…please do consider entering if you have a
collection of short stories.

The University of Pittsburgh Press announces the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature
Prize for a collection of short fiction. The prize carries a cash award of
$15,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press under its
standard contract. The winner will be announced in December or January. No
information about the winner will be released before the official announcement.
The volume of manuscripts prevents the Press from offering critiques or
entering into communication or correspondence about manuscripts. Please do not
call or e-mail the Press.

Eligibility

1.

The award is open to writers who have published a novel or a book-length
collection of fiction with a reputable book publisher, or a minimum of three
short stories or novellas in magazines or journals of national distribution.
Digital-only publication and self-publication do not count toward this
requirement.

2.

The award is open to writers in English, whether or not they are citizens of
the United States.

3.

University of Pittsburgh employees, former employees, current students, and
those who have been students within the last three years are not eligible for
the award.

4.

Translations are not eligible if the translation was not done by the author.

5.

Eligible submissions include an unpublished manuscript of short stories; two or
more novellas (a novella may comprise a maximum of 130 double-spaced typed
pages); or a combination of one or more novellas and short stories. Novellas
are only accepted as part of a larger collection. Manuscripts may be no fewer
than 150 and no more than 300 pages. Prior publication of your manuscript as a
whole in any format (including electronic) makes it ineligible.

6.

Stories or novellas previously published in magazines or journals or in book
form as part of an anthology are eligible.

7.

Manuscripts may also be under consideration by other publishers, but if a
manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere and you wish to accept this
offer, please notify the Press immediately. Manuscripts under contract
elsewhere are no longer eligible for the Prize.

8.

Authors may submit more than one manuscript to the competition as long as one
manuscript or a portion thereof does not duplicate material submitted in
another manuscript.

Dates for Submission

Manuscripts must be received during May and June 2017. That is, they must be
postmarked on or after May 1 and on or before June 30.

Format for Electronic Submissions

1.

During the submission period (May 1 - June 30) simply click the link above.
You'll be taken to our secure submittable.com web page where you'll find
easy-to-follow instructions:

2.

Manuscripts must be double-spaced and pages must be numbered consecutively.

3.

Each submission must include a list of all of the writer's published short
fiction work, with full citations. You will be given an opportunity to enter
this information into a field in Submittable.

4.

Manuscripts will be judged anonymously. Therefore, the author's name, other
identifying information, and publication information must not appear within the
manuscript. Only your uploaded manuscript is visible to the judges.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

The happiest news, really: I’m thrilled to report that my
next novel, SILVER GIRL, is going to be published by Unnamed Press, a fabulous small press
based in L.A.It seems entirely possible
that the novel will be out in the winter of 2018!!

I’m working on my “elevator speech” about the book, but here’s
an attempt: Set in the 80s, SILVER GIRL is about a destructive friendship
between two girls from very different backgrounds who end up at a fancy college
in the Chicago area…set against a backdrop of the Tylenol murders, when someone
stuffed cyanide into Tylenol capsules and returned them to the drugstore shelves
(which one could do because this was before product packaging was sealed;
actually, this is WHY intense product packaging came about).

Here’s the opening:

My roommate
arrived first, staking her claim. Probably someone told her do it that way, her
cum laude mother or Ivy League dad or an older sibling or cousin in college. I
had no one telling me anything. So I didn’t know to take the overnight bus to
Chicago from Iowa instead of the one arriving late in the afternoon, meaning
when I unlocked the dorm room door I saw a fluffy comforter with bright poppies
already arranged on the bed along the wall with the window, cracked open to
grab the only breeze. Several dozen white plastic hangers holding blazers and
skirts and blouses filled the closet with the door where F.U. wasn’t gouged
into the wood.

I rubbed my
fingers along the grooves of those letters, imagining a deeply angry freshman
girl digging a nail file from the clutter of her purse, carving those letters
into the wood while at the library her roommate wrote a smart paper about Jane
Austen or blew her boyfriend in a car parked by the lake or spray-painted
acorns lustrous gold for table centerpieces at a sorority mother-daughter tea.
I hoped my roommate wouldn’t be that angry girl.

Also, I
hoped I wouldn’t be.

Here are two chapters that appeared online, in slightly
different form:

So much to do to bring a book into the world…and please,
please do let me know if there’s a reading series or bookstore or party at your
house that you think I should know about! I’d love to do a reading and see YOU
there!

Here’s the first paragraph, in case you need more
information before committing to that three minutes:

"No one says dating anymore." Thirteen-year-old
Stephanie is always proud when she's able to correct an adult, especially her
father, who's barely listening. To be honest, he barely listens to most
conversations, so she shouldn't feel particularly special or at all dissed,
though whenever she's with him, she feels both. He's gifted with the
politician's ability to sustain lengthy, complicated, even heartfelt
conversations while barely listening; questions, answers, words are an empty
flow, like the whooshing sound spiraling through a seashell.

Monday, June 12, 2017

Anna Leahy
and Doug Dechow have written a superbly crafted dual chronicle of their love
affairs with space exploration and each other.
Generation Space: A Love Story is
as good a history of the space program as any to be found.

Anna is an English Professor at Chapman
University. Her collections of poetry
include Aperture and Constituents of Matter, winner of the
Wick Poetry Prize. Doug, a librarian at Chapman University, is the co-author of SQUEAK: A Quick Trip to Objectland,
Intertwingled: The Work and Influence
of Ted Nelson, and The Craft of
Librarian Instruction. They have
written the Lofty Ambitions blog
together since 2010.

JN:
When I began reading the book, I thought, this is going to be
overwhelmingly technical, a slog through mind-boggling scientific and
mechanical terminology and detail. One
of your great accomplishments is that you produced a book ABOUT a highly
technical subject without overpowering your reader with scientific
minutiae. How did you do that?

Anna and Doug:
That’s terrific to hear because we wanted to strike a balance in which we
acknowledge that a complex machine like the space shuttle is a collection of
interrelated scientific and engineering facts without the reader being
distracted from the story by jargon. We thought about this book as a story—our
story and the story of the Space Age. And we thought about people—characters—as
an important way for this story to come alive for readers.

In Generation Space, we talk about why particular
shuttle launches were scrubbed, for instance, and try to convey how caught up
we were in learning about mechanical parts like a GUPC or a thermostat because
they were an integral part of our story of seeing—and not seeing—launches. We
want readers to feel a sense of learning NASA lingo right along with us and to
understand how quickly some of the basic jargon became natural to us as we
immersed ourselves in the newsroom culture at Kennedy Space Center. We kept in
mind, too, that there are a lot of space nerds out there who already know RTLS
means return to launch site and we
hope they are reminded that, at some point, they had learned to talk and think
in such terms, that they carry this terminology in their minds. Of course, we
didn’t talk about all of the 2.5 million parts in the shuttle configuration
sitting on the launch pad, but we wanted to give a sense of how intricate the
shuttle was because that had everything to do with how amazing it was to see
one actually rise from the ground into orbit.

JN:
Collaboration in writing a book or poem has to be tricky. Would the two of you comment on the process
as well as some of the challenges you faced (and overcame) in writing Generation Space?

Anna and Doug:
It is tricky for any two writers to collaborate, and we don’t recommend
anyone begin with a big project. For us, collaborating as writers was very much
wrapped up in being a couple romantically as well, so that probably doubles the
risks as well as the benefits. We joke that we haven’t figured out how to share
the task of doing laundry—we each do our own—and that may be because we don’t
care much about laundry. When the stakes are low, why increase the risk of
discord?

That said,
we started with a small writing project and a big reward years before we tackled
Generation Space together. On a lark,
we sent an abstract to a call for conference papers about World War II. It was
accepted, so we drew from our dates at aviation museums to write about the
theory and practice of how museums display WWII aircraft. Figuring out how to
write together allowed us to travel to Amsterdam. And then, we spun that
writing into a book chapter and an article in Curator. That early validation made us think we were onto
something.

JN:
It struck me as I read Generation
Space that both of you were able to maintain your own voice while at the
same time crafting a piece without a jarring difference of style while shifting
from one point of view to the other. Are
your writing styles naturally similar?
Was this something of a happy accident, or was it a conscious effort on
your parts to create this stylistic consistency?

Anna and Doug: In
a way, this issue of voice has been thorny for us. We had developed what we
call a together voice—the one we’re using now in this interview—for Lofty Ambitions blog. When we
started that project in 2010, we would have weekly date nights at a local
watering hole and write our posts together sentence by sentence. In the
process, we got to know each other’s voices and negotiating ways to represent
both of us authentically. Figuring out who “we” are meant more than just
writing together. And with that ongoing reference point of the other, we each honed
own individual voices too and understood that we each notice and value
sometimes very different things.

An early
partial draft of Generation Space was
in our together voice. We liked it, but readers didn’t trust it. No one
believes we can agree on a single way to look at something. Ultimately, we
admitted that we needed the two perspectives, we remembered things differently,
and we find meaning in different ways. So, the lack of a jarring difference
probably stems from years of writing together and, as couples do, hashing
through topics over time so that we became more similar generally. Over time, we
end up agreeing a lot but definitely maintain our distinct opinions and turns
of phrase, too.

JN:
At one point Doug says, “…and I wouldn’t be sure about Anna without
these last few years together” (260),
and Anna says, “I’d reshaped myself, and Doug and I had become closer
than ever before” (229). This is an
extremely personal question, but can you compare briefly the difference in your
relationship before and after your immersion into the exploration and
experience of the shuttle launches and landings? I guess I’m thinking about how two very
independent people with somewhat parallel but very different careers can forge
a lasting and loving relationship with each other. What’s your secret?

Anna and Doug:
In 2008, we moved to California. That Thanksgiving, we drove into the
desert to see a space shuttle land. The following Thanksgiving, we eloped. In
our minds, these events are all of a piece. We’d fallen in love twenty years before
we married, and there are all sorts of ways it’s difficult to grow into adults
as a couple. Moving to California was a conscious choice to start a new stage
together. Looking out at the tarmac at Edwards Air Force Base to see the shuttle
moments after it had been up in space gave us a sense of being situated between
the past and the future.

In the
book, we open with the line, “Ours has never been a conventional love story.”
Even before we knew we wanted to be academics or had much sense of career
paths, we discovered early on that we both enjoyed research, travel, and
writing. Over the years, these interests—the next trip or move, the next
question or blog post—have underpinned our relationship. As a writer or as a
couple, you never master it once and for all. The next place or the next writing
project presents different challenges and different opportunities. In order to stick
with it, a person has to get a kick out of the process itself. And each
experience reshapes you a bit. Our secret may be that we’ve been willing to
reshape ourselves.

JN:
Have the two of you developed any ongoing relationships with any of the
astronauts you met on your journey?

Anna and Doug:
The first time we met astronauts together was an unexpected accident
that we recount in the book. We mostly talked with astronauts in our role as
journalists. We talked with a few astronauts—Charlie Duke and Mike Barratt, for
instance—more than once, and we’ve talked with Garrett Reisman informally as
well as in our official roles. Over the last several years, we’ve found
astronauts to be amazingly engaging, intelligent, quirky folks. In other words,
they are just the sort of people we’d like to hang out with. But we run in
different circles, and astronauts are relatively rare among us. Only twelve men
walked on the Moon, and fewer than 550 people have been to space.

JN:
Doug, have you heard anything in response to the application you sent in
to NASA?

Doug:
As I expected, I was not among those applicants brought to Houston for
in-person interviews last fall. I knew when I applied that, if I made the final
cut, I would have to be the oldest astronaut candidate ever selected. Don’t get
me wrong, that would have been amazing.

The new
class of astronauts should be announced very soon. I won’t be among them. The
average age for an astronaut candidate is thirty-four. I talk about the magic astronaut
age and timing in Generation Space. I
actively pursued becoming an astronaut early on, then missed the most obvious
window. What a different life I’d have lived if I’d been able to clear my ears
during a physical when I was eighteen. But I can’t imagine a better mission for
my life than the one I’m on right now—and I wouldn’t have met Anna. I’ll be
cheering the new group on—on to Mars.

JN:
Do the two of you plan to collaborate on another book?

Anna and Doug:
Long before we started writing Generation
Space, we had talked about writing a book about particularly intriguing
aircraft. Last fall, we were fellows at the American Library in Paris so we
could get back to that project. As we answer these questions, we are getting
ready to head back to France for more research in the amazing history of French
aviation and for the International Paris Air Show. We’re not sure how this research
will pan out—isn’t that why any couple sticks with it? Isn’t love a long-term
research project in which we create something that didn’t exist in the world
before?